I spent a significant amount of money making sure that an eighty-year-old woman would be comfortable on an aeroplane for the first time in thirty years.
And at no point in four months of planning did I ask her why she had not flown in thirty years.
Not once.
I planned an entire trip around that fact. I used it as the organising principle — she hasn’t flown in thirty years, so it has to be comfortable — and I said that sentence out loud to at least four people while booking it.
And I never once turned it over and looked at the other side, which has a question written on it in enormous letters.
Because a nice gesture does not require you to know anything about the person.
That is exactly what makes it so appealing, and it is why it is the first thing people reach for.
A first-class seat costs money. A question costs something else entirely and there is no way to pay it in instalments.
It has been eleven months.
Nobody was sued.
There was no settlement. There has been no formal apology and there is not going to be one, and anybody expecting that ending has never dealt with an organisation of that size.
I wanted one. For about four weeks I wanted it very badly and I made two telephone calls about it that I now find embarrassing.
What there is, is a line added to a technical file.
A single entry. Four lines.
Recording the origin of a 1998 report, and the name of the person who filed it, and the date.
It took the airline’s historical records team about four weeks and two internal meetings.
I am told, by somebody in a position to know, that an amendment of that kind to a closed technical file is genuinely unusual.
And that it will not be removed. It is in there now, with his name and a date on it, for as long as that airline keeps records, which is longer than any of us.
And a letter.
From a forty-one-year-old pilot to an eighty-year-old woman. Two pages. Handwritten, on hotel paper, posted rather than emailed.
She keeps it in that bag now, folded, next to the boarding pass, which means that bag currently contains two pieces of paper and a set of wings and is probably the most valuable object in our family.
